I seem to buy cookbooks more than I use cookbooks, sound familiar? I thought I would reacquaint myself with my cookbook shelf and so devised a project for myself. Each week I will cook from a single cookbook at least twice and am going to post it here, just to keep myself honest.

My first book is James Peterson's Sauces. I am not up for any giant projects this week, so it is kind of hard to choose. The first couple recipes I looked at required making 2 to 3 sauces to make the final recipe. Tonight I made a Korean dipping sauce. Easy, not anything I would need this book for: soy sauce, sugar, chillies, cilantro, sesame oil and seeds; the usual suspects. Fancy things that people didn't buy for Easter were on sale this week so I paired it with beef tenderloin steaks and cooked organic shrimp, along with stir fried snow peas and asparagus. We all liked it fine, easy but it seemed a bit decadent for a week night. Mommy points scored.

I think, for the weekend, I will make Chicken with Verjus and Ancient Spices (or something like that). He says that verjus may be hard to come by so you can just use the juice of sour grapes, but sour grapes may be hard to come by, so you can use the juice of sweet grapes with an equal amount of vinegar. I am thinking some grape juice from the store. It also has saffron and mint (chopped immediately before sprinkling on the finished dish - this dude is a bit anal).

This is a great idea Mary! I love that it's not overwhelming by cooking the new recipes just 2x/week. I may just have to adopt this myself! I too have many cookbooks that I've not yet used, including Sauces.

I too have never cooked from Sauces, (somehow I have 2 different ones). Told myself it was just a reference book. Using that criteria, I have bookshelves full of "reference books". lol.

I look forward to reading your entries. I will not commit to doing the same now as the grandkids are coming so it will be Cuban food and then I hope we'll be going to LA for my son's PH.D. graduation (he's still debating whether to walk ). So here's hoping for June.

PS. How did you determine that Sauces was the one to use to start your wonderful project?

Actually, I made a sauce from Sauces this week; a basic Japanese sauce for fish (title was something along those lines), basically Dashi plus some other bits. Had it with udon noodles and black cod. My wife raved over it; it is her kind of taste profile.

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